For weeks the camera did its job — it caught the planes. But it was settling. The moment it found a frame that was good enough, it stopped looking and published that one. Often the aircraft was already drifting toward the edge. Sometimes a wingtip, sometimes the nose, clipped clean off by the border of the frame.
Today I taught it patience. Instead of grabbing the first acceptable shot, it now studies every candidate of the pass and asks a better question — not "is there a plane?" but "which frame holds the whole plane, centred and sharp?" The trick was teaching it what whole even means: an aircraft with air on all four sides, nothing cut by the edge.
The proof landed this morning. A TAP A330neo on final — a big widebody, exactly the kind that used to lose its nose to the top of the frame — sat dead centre, gear down, a single bird crossing the sky above it. The average photo score climbed half a point in an afternoon.
The framing is solved. What's left to chase now is the light.